The Hamas health ministry said on Sunday February 4 that at least 92 people had been killed overnight. According to the Palestinian movement’s press office, an Israeli bombing hit a kindergarten in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, where people who had fled the fighting had found refuge.
The Israeli army also continued its bombings in Khan Younes, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP), whose journalist confirms that airstrikes also targeted Rafah. Fears are growing about a possible military offensive against this overpopulated city, on the closed border with Egypt. In this city of 200,000 inhabitants, more than 1 million displaced Palestinians, threatened by shortages and epidemics, are now crowded into shelters and makeshift camps.
For Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Rafah is the next target. “We will reach Rafah and eliminate the terrorist elements that threaten us”he said Thursday.
The Hamas health ministry announced on Sunday a toll of 27,365 people killed, mostly women, children and adolescents, in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war. In a press release, he reported 127 deaths in the last twenty-four hours and a total of 66,630 people injured since October 7. The war has resulted in the death of more than 1,160 people on Israeli soil, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
Hamas studies truce plan
On the diplomatic front, American Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected in the Middle East on Sunday to support negotiations for a new truce between Israel and Hamas. He is due to travel to Qatar, Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Saudi Arabia.
Negotiations are continuing to reach a second truce, longer than the one week which allowed at the end of November the release of around a hundred hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians detained by Israel.
The leader of Hamas, Ismaïl Haniyeh, based in Qatar, is expected in Egypt to discuss a draft agreement drawn up by Qatari, American and Egyptian mediators. It first provides for a six-week truce and the release of Palestinians (between two hundred and three hundred) detained in Israel in exchange for around forty hostages, according to a Hamas source.
In Beirut, a leader of the Palestinian movement, Osama Hamdane, however, stressed that it was premature to talk about a truce agreement. The project “is a framework agreement that needs to be studied”he said.
A delegation of French left-wing elected officials, en route to Rafah, calls for a “ceasefire”
“We demand a lasting, permanent and immediate ceasefire”declared MP Eric Coquerel (La France insoumise, LFI), on Saturday during a press conference in Cairo, where the fifteen elected officials are stopping off before reaching the Rafah border post on Sunday.
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The delegation brings together LFI deputies and senators, environmentalists, communists and overseas. “We came in a spirit of friendship for all the peoples of the region”continued the elected official, who has been working on this trip since December.
He highlighted the ” context “ of their displacement, a week after the International Court of Justice called Israel “to take all measures in its power to prevent acts which could fall within the scope of the United Nations Genocide Convention”.
New American strikes
Hamas, which took power in Gaza in 2007, is demanding a permanent ceasefire. What the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, refuses, despite growing pressure from hostage relatives and the international community. In Tel Aviv, several hundred people demonstrated again on Saturday, demanding the return of the hostages and the resignation of the government.
On other fronts in the region, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said Saturday that Israeli forces had targeted “more than 3,400 targets” of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and killed two hundred “terrorists and commanders” since October. “More than fifty targets” Hezbollah in Syria were attacked, he added.
On the Israeli-Lebanese border, there are daily exchanges of fire between Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, and the Israeli army.
Elsewhere in the region, Syria and Iraq have denounced deadly strikes carried out against pro-Iran groups on their territories by the United States, in retaliation for an attack on an American military base in Jordan on January 28 which cost life for three soldiers.
On Saturday, the United States, Israel’s main supporter, and the United Kingdom announced that they had bombed dozens of targets in Yemen on Saturday, in response to repeated attacks carried out by Houthi rebels, supported by Iran, against ships.